The final scene in Alien, in which Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley triumphantly defeats the alien, is, hands down, one of the film’s most iconic scenes.

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But it wasn’t always meant to end that way. In a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, director Ridley Scott revealed he initially had a very different ending in mind and it was gruesome.

Instead of Ripley having her final triumphant battle with the xenomorph and recording a captain’s log entry before grabbing hero cat Jones and tucking into hypersleep, Scott suggested the following: “I thought that the alien should come in, and Ripley harpoons it and it makes no difference, so it slams through her mask and rips her head off.” Next, Scott says, he’d have cut to the tentacles of the alien pressing buttons on the dashboard. “It would mimic Captain Dallas [Skerritt] saying, ‘I’m signing off.'”

A Fox executive apparently wasn’t so fond of the idea of killing Ripley. In fact, he apparently threatened to fire Scott if he went through with his initial idea. Of course, he didn’t. And as we all know, Ripley went on to kick some serious alien butt in three Alien sequels and became a sci-fi-horror icon.